more than comes to their share.

5. But however highly this tribe of people may think of themselves, a
drunken man is a greater monster than any that is to be found among all
the creatures which God has made; as indeed there is no character which
appears more despicable and deformed, in the eyes of all reasonable
persons, than that of a drunkard.

6. _Bonosus_, one of our own countrymen, who was addicted to this vice,
having set up for a share in the Roman empire, and being defeated in a
great battle, hanged himself. When he was seen by the army in this
melancholy situation, notwithstanding he had behaved himself very
bravely, the common jest was, that the thing they saw hanging upon the
tree before them, was not a man, but a bottle.

7. This vice has very fatal effects on the mind, the body and fortune of
the person who is devoted to it.

In regard to the mind, it first of all discovers every flaw in it. The
sober man, by the strength of reason, may keep under and subdue every
vice or folly to which he is most inclined; but wine makes every latent
seed sprout up in the soul, and shew itself: it gives fury to the
passions, and force to those objects which are apt to produce them.

8. When a young fellow complained to an old philosopher that his wife
was not handsome; Put less water into your wine, says the philosopher,
and you'll quickly make her so. Wine heightens indifference into love,
love into jealousy, and jealousy into madness. It often turns the good
natured man into an idiot, and the choleric into an assassin. It gives
bitterness to resentment, it makes vanity insupportable, and displays
every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

9. Nor does this vice only betray the hidden faults of a man, and shew
them in most odious colours, but often occasions faults to which he is
not naturally subject. There is more of turn than of truth in a saying
of _Seneca_, that drunkenness does not produce, but discover faults.
Common experience teaches the contrary.

10. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses qualities into the
mind, which she is a stranger to in her sober moments. The person you
converse with, after the third bottle, is not the same man who at first
sat down at the table with you. Upon this maxim is founded one of the
prettiest sayings I ever met with, which is inscribed to _Publius Syrus,
He who jests unto a man that is drunk, injures the absent_.

11. Thus does drunkenness act in dir